Full of wonder, I shook my head. The idea of madness was not easy for me to appreciate: I had for examples only the booksweep himself and the character of Carpo the Fool from Tales of the Trustees, both of whom appeared more formidable than pathetic. I asked whether George the book-sweep had been among the victims of this first attack. My motive was not primarily to learn more about the terrors of WESCAC, but if possible to lead Max discreetly towards the matter he'd first essayed; and I was so far successful, that he left off fisting his brow and wound up his history:
"Yes, well, it wasn't the Riot George was hurt in, but the peace." He explained that terrible as the two Campus Riots had been, they were in one sense almost trifling, the result not of basic contradictions between the belligerents but of old-fashioned collegiate pride (what he called militant alma-materism) and unfavorable balances in the informational economy between Siegfried, for example, and its fellow West-Campus colleges. All the while, however, as it were in the background of the two riots, a farther-reaching conflict had developed: a contradiction of first principles that cut across college boundaries and touched upon all the departments of campus life — not only economics and political science, but philosophy, literature, pedagogy; even agriculture and religion.
"What I mean," he said soberly, "is Student-Unionism versus Informationalism. You'll learn about it as you go along: it's the biggest varsity fact the campus has got to live with these days, and nobody can explain it all at once." For the present I had to content myself with understanding that many semesters ago, in what history professors called the Rematriculation Period, the old West-Campus faith in such things as an all-powerful Founder and a Final Examination that sent one forever to Commencement Gate or the Dean o' Flunks had declined (even as Chickie's lover had declared in the pasture) from an intellectual force to a kind of decorous folk-belief. Students still crowded once a week into Founder's Hall to petition an invisible "Examiner" for leniency; schoolchildren still were taught the moral principles of Moishe's Code and the Seminar-on-the-Hill; but in practice only the superstitious really felt any more that the beliefs they ran their lives by had any ultimate validity. The new evidence of the sciences was most disturbing: there had been, it appeared, no Foundation-Day: the University had always existed; men's acts, which had been thought to be freely willed and thus responsible, seemed instead to spring in large measure from dark urgings, unreasoning and always guileful; moral principles were regarded by the Psychology Department as symptoms on the order of dreams, by the Anthropology Department as historical relics on the order of potsherds, by the Philosophy Department variously as cadavers for logical dissection or necessary absurdities. The result (especially for thoughtful students) was confusion, anxiety, frustration, despair, and a fitful search for something to fill the moral vacuum in their quads. Thus the proliferation of new religions, secular and otherwise, in the last half-dozen generations: the Pre-Schoolers, with their decadent primitivism and their morbid regard for emotion, dark fancy, and deep sleep; the Curricularists, with their pedagogic nostrums and naïve faith in "the infinite educability of studentdom"; the Evolutionaries; the quasi-mystical Ismists; the neo-Enochians with their tender-minded retreat to the old fraternities — emasculated, however, into aestheticism and intellectual myth-worship; the Bonifacists, frantically sublimating their libidos to the administrative level and revering their Kanzler as if he were a founder; the Secular-Studentists (called by their detractors Mid-Percentile or Bourgeois-Liberal Baccalaureates) for whom Max himself declared affinity, with their dogged trust in the self-sufficiency of student reason; the Ethical Quadranglists, who subscribed to a doctrine of absolute relativity; the Sexual Programmatists, the Tragicists and New Quixotics, the "Angry Young Freshmen," the "Beist Generation," and all the rest.
Among these new beliefs, Max said, was Student-Unionism, a political-religious philosophy that flowered among the lowest percentiles after the Informational Revolution. As men had turned from post-graduate dreams to the things of this campus, they set off the great explosion of knowledge that still reverberated in our time. Students rose against masters, masters against chairmen; departments banded together into the college-units we know today, drawing their strength from heavy engineering and applied-science laboratories and vast reference libraries. But the "Petty Informationalists" were as lawless in their way as the old department heads had been, and on a far grander scale: where before an occasional sizar had been flogged, or a co-ed ravished by the droit de Fauteuil, now thousands and millions of the ignorant were exploited by the learned. Mere kindergarteners were sent down into the Coal-Research diggings; pregnant sophomore girls toiled in sweat-labs and rat-infested carrels. Such were the abuses that drove the Pre-Schoolist poets to cry, "The Campus is realer than the Classroom!" while their counterparts in Philosophy asserted that all the ills of studentdom were effects of formal education. But however productive of great art, the Pre-Schoolist philosophy offered little consolation — and no hope — to the masses of illiterates in their sooty dorms and squalid auditoriums. These it was who commenced to turn, in desperation, to the Confraternité Administratif des Etudiants, from beneath whose scarlet pennant a new Grand Tutor, fierce-bearded and sour of visage, cried: "Students of the quads, unite!"
The Student-Unionist Prospectus (Max went on) was not in itself inimical to the spirit of the "Open College" or "Free Research" way of student life: only to its unregulated excesses. Its pacific doctrine was that wherever studentdom is divided into the erudite and ignorant, masters and pupils, a synthesis must inevitably take place; thus Informationalism, based as it was on the concept of private knowledge, must succumb of its own contradictions as did Departmentalism before it. All information and physical plant would become the property of the Student Union; rank and tenure would be abolished, erudition and illiteracy done away with; since Founder and Finals were lies invented by professors to keep students in check, there were in reality no Answers: instead of toiling fearfully for the selfish goal of personal Commencement, a perfectly disciplined student body would live communally in well-regulated academies, studying together at prescribed hours a prescribed curriculum that taught them to subordinate their individual minds to the Mind of the Group. Stated thus, the movement won a host of converts not only among the stupid and oppressed but among the intelligent as well, who saw in its selflessness an alternative to the tawdry hucksterism of the "open college" at its worst — where Logic Departments exhorted one in red neon to Syllogize One's Weight Away, and metaphysicians advertised by wireless that The Chap Who Can Philosophize Never Ossifies. Max confessed that he himself, as a freshman, had belonged like many intellectual Moishians to a Student-Unionist organization — a fact which was to plague him in later life — and had sympathized whole-heartedly with the Curricularists in Nikolay College who, during Campus Riot I, had overthrown their despotic chancellor and established the first Student-Unionist regime.